As flames cover the sky in front of him, Adrien Aubert is clearly incredulous. His amateur video of the Lac-Mégantic explosion shows a town divided by a towering wall of fire.

Aubert, who estimates that he is about 200 metres from downtown, narrates the disaster in French, explaining how the various tankers are exploding one by one while peppering in some (understandable, given the circumstances) obscenities in both French and English.

...

Raw amateur video from the night of the explosion. Note, there is some (understandable) adult language in both French and English. here

The train’s engineer (staying in town after parking his train at the top of a hill ~6 mi away) rounded up a railcar moving vehicle and pulled 9 to 13 cars off of the back of the train before they could become involved.

The timeline on this is still unclear, but it appears that within as little as 20 minutes up to two short hours from the time the locomotive was turned off, this train turned into a runaway bomb. Another factoid is that the grade into town as 1.2% which compares to the 1.4% found in the Rocky Mountains. Talk about locked and loaded!

Some have posted that the Keystone Pipeline would not have prevented this disaster. While that MAY be true, the focus needs to be on preventing the NEXT disaster. This was a relatively small train, no? Consider the scale of disaster that can happen on the main flow line down through the heartland to the Gulf Coast.

It is good that he did that but I don’t think it will buy him redemption. For his sake I hope he did everything by the book. I would not want to have this disaster on my conscience. Prayers for all involved.

The media nearly go through the motions of regurgitating press releases without doing any investigation on their own. Plus they have no curiosity and can't put together a logical story line to save their lame butts.

As far as I know the air pressure in an air brake system is used to TAKE OFF the brakes which are failsafe and otherwise always ‘on’. Rip the brake lines out of an air brake system and the wheels lock.

24
posted on 07/10/2013 10:22:23 AM PDT
by TalBlack
(Evil doesn't have a day job.)

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